The pay is lousy and it doesn't matter what you do if you do one thing wrong in the slightest you will be dinged and it is insanely easy to get a zero on a call. The callers are often abusive and people are rude more often than not. There isn't much consistency even though they tout that there is. Nothing against them, but a lot of people in IT (almost all of them) are in India which can sometimes make communication challenging (though they are extremely nice). They say they are a different kind of company, but under all the bandaids they put on to make it look pretty, they are the same as the rest and it's all about their bottom line. If you want to advance, say goodbye to the best thing about the job, the ability to make your own schedule which is the only reason I stay.

Get to work from home which is both a pro and a con. You learn a lot, but at the expense of your sanity.

Cons

Stringent standards, high stress, especially when getting thrown onto new accounts without any training. Even when following proper procedure, you get reprimanded by leads, management, and account owners. Highly do not recommend.

Advice to Management

If you want less turn over, focus on quality of service. Not quantity produced by numbers on a sheet of paper or on the computer screen.

I like to be at home and be accessible to family. I save on gas and vehicle maintenance repair cost, wardrobe, hair salon cost and buying lunch out. Between shift I can cook dinner, clean and spend time with family. Most of all I love being able to schedule my own shifts and breaks. I also like the appreciation shown by thank yous and sometimes a surprise gift in the mail to you.

Cons

Sometimes I find that getting questions answered for clients in an immediate way can be challenging and having not having enough agents to help with call volume. Pay is too low!!

Advice to Management

Better pay! A person can't live on $9 an hour, so a person with a family has to find another job to support them or just find a job with better pay and hopefully medical benefits.

Metrics for QA change constantly. If a new metric is put in place today, your calls from last week will be graded against the new metric and your scores will suffer. Dispute a poor score and suddenly you will not get your QA scores until it is too late to dispute the poor score. Management is difficult if not impossible to contact and heaven help you if a caller demands a manager because no one will ever help you. Rules and requirements change on a daily basis and the official documentation is not updated. You are to read the script verbatim, except for when you are supposed to remember to change it. If you make a mistake on the documentation such as marking a caller for call back and you actually transferred the call when the call required transfer you cannot correct the mistake and will be "coached" repeatedly by different team leads for the same mistake. Even worse is when the call was a few shifts ago and you have answered 500 more calls since then, TLs expect you to remember every detail of that call without listening to the call again or having access to the screens you were on. Once while answering calls during a busy shift my cell phone was ringing off the hook; Chennai was calling to ask me to log in for an additional shift. Not only did they not look at who was already working, I later got "coached" for taking myself out of the queue to answer my cell. I only answered it because 3 calls in 4 minutes made me worry that my daycare provider was attempting to contact me in an emergency.

Advice to Management

Pay better wages, provide adequate training, have team leads that are available and helpful, document changes and try not to make so many changes a person cannot keep up.

Work from home and set your own schedule. Good job for single parents, students, etc who only need a little bit of extra money as the minimum weekly hour requirement is only 16, and this is easy enough to reach. It's not hard to get a bit of time off if you need a vacation provided you have notice, though this will be unpaid and affects your weekly hour average. You get assigned a new tier every week based on your performance statistics and QAs and this affects the hours you can pick from. If you get a top tier it is possible to work pretty leisurely shifts where you're only taking a handful of calls per hour, though this is difficult/rare and requires being willing to work night hours. This job is great for night owls if you can score those shifts. Dedicated departments that service a single client exist and have regular/set hours and are usually very slow shifts. This is nice if you game or have other things to do that you can interrupt to actually take calls. There are benefits for working more than 35 hours a week and these are cheap IF you live in Oregon.

Cons

Requires your own hardware/software and you must be willing to allow the IT employees from Chennai to remote into your computer to set it up and do maintenance; on one occasion one of them "accidentally" switched on my webcam. They seem to switch software every six months and it is always buggy and has frequent issues; you are not compensated for the time you spend having tech issues and it usually negatively impacts your stats, which bars you from being able to schedule better hours. Supervisors are not well-trained and frequently take an outright antagonistic attitude toward employees. Department or team shuffles are common and done with little or no notice. When this happens this can seriously mess up your schedule and management not only has no empathy for the position this can put you in but rebukes you if you attempt to call attention to it or ask for it to be rectified, even if this is done as courteously and professionally as possible. Pay is slightly above minimum wage (~10/hr starting) which is not enough considering the sheer number of clients you're expected to service and there is no increased pay for positions that require adopting more responsibilities. Raises are technically possible during your yearly review, but require nigh-unreachable performance standards that are constantly rising, and when given are extremely tiny (I have gotten one 10 cent per hour raise in over two years). Neither the pay nor the raises are negotiable. Standards of performance are subject to change with no notice; the supervisors will flat-out tell you that it is your responsibility to read the employee manual/QA requirements every day and look for changes on your own (uncompensated!) time, rather than, say, fulfilling their job description and actively notifying their team members of changes to protocols and standards. Some supervisors are better about this than others, to be fair. Socializing and being friendly with other employees on Skype is a requirement (though this is not mentioned during training) and you will be denied raises or given poor performance reviews if you are not viewed as sociable enough. Since calls are usually back-to-back during the day, it's a mystery when they expect you to take the time to shoot the breeze. There is also a downright bizarre corporate culture they try very hard to cultivate. A disproportionately high number of clients are extremely shady (MLM schemes, outright scammers) or inappropriate to be foisting on untrained employees (rape crisis lines, psychiatric/substance abuse lines). On top of this all the usual woes of call center work i.e. rude callers, people screaming at you, not having adequate information to help people, etc apply. You have to be willing to lie to people a LOT about any number of things and shift roles on a moment's notice. Good luck bringing up unethical or downright illegal clients to your supervisors, by the way; this is a great way to lose your job.

Advice to Management

Better pay across the board. The BSAs aren't paid enough and there are no raises or incentives given for taking on more responsibilities; this is ridiculous. A complete overhaul of the way team/department transfers is necessary because they're presently very unprofessional and put employees in a really bad position. Seniority and length of time working at the company should mean something, especially when employee turnover is as high as it is. Supervisors need to be better trained. Workload in general should be more evenly dispersed across the board.